Magento – change the scope of product’s “status” attribute to store level

Store View Scope means you can have a value for the Default Scope (Global) and a different value for the Store view.

You have the following situation:

Store view: Global Scope Value, Store View Value:

store view 1: A,B

store view 2: A,C

If you change the scope from Store View to Global and you have products that already have values sets, Magento doesn't know what to do with the values. What values should we keep? A (the global one), B (the store view one). That is why you get the message.

The check is in Mage_Catalog_Model_Resource_Eav_Attribute::_beforeSave():

[...]
     if (($this->_data['is_global'] != $this->_origData['is_global'])
                && $this->_getResource()->isUsedBySuperProducts($this)) {
                Mage::throwException(Mage::helper('catalog')->__('Scope must not be changed, because the attribute is used in configurable products.'));
            }
[...]

You do have the following options:

• if you didn't use that attribute yet, just delete it and create it again
• if you are using it, create a new one and use import/export to update the values

Here is a quick fix.
you need to identify the attribute ids for all global attributes then delete all the values from the catalog_product_entity_* tables that have the attribute id one of those identified above and the store id field not zero.

DELETE FROM `catalog_product_entity_int` 
WHERE
   store_id <> 0 AND
   attribute_id IN (
           SELECT attribute_id 
           FROM catalog_eav_attribute 
           WHERE is_global = 1

   )

Do the same for the tables catalog_product_entity_varchar, catalog_product_entity_text, catalog_product_entity_datetime, catalog_product_entity_decimal.

Rebuild your indexes when your are done.

Note: The select from catalog_eav_attribute in the way I wrote it will give you attribute ids for the global category attributes also, but that's not important since in the product tables you don't have category attributes references.

Also, before trying this, backup your database in case I missed something.